


Aftermath

by kitsune



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-01-07
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:39:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsune/pseuds/kitsune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack wants an explanation. He probably wouldn't mind an apology, either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> This is set immediately after Cyberwoman and ignores anything not in the episode (i.e., Ianto's suspension, from the BBC website). It may be considered AU, depending on your definition of canon. Written because I couldn't believe nothing was ever said.

Ianto slumped in the chair and looked at the scratched wooden surface of the table. His head was pounding and he could hear his own breathing, shallow and quick. The surges of rage and terror, grappling with shifting loyalties, and the plunge from hope to despair in the last few hours had drained him. Everything he’d sacrificed for was gone, all hopes and plans ruined past redemption, the future as bleak as this room.

Jack walked in with a glass of water in his hand and dropped two white tablets into it. He swirled the glass until they dissolved, then put it on the table in front of Ianto. “Drink it,” he said curtly.

He drained the glass and set it down. In the silence of the interrogation room the click of it meeting the table sounded like a gunshot. “Is it retcon?”

Jack leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Do you want it to be?”

He didn’t know. Lisa was gone. As Jack had dragged him out of the room, he’d ordered the others to incinerate everything in it. He was taking no chances. All that was left of her by now were Ianto’s memories and the blood soaking through his clothing. There were rusty smears on his shirt cuffs, larger streaks on his hands where he’d cradled her head. His suit was saturated from kneeling on the floor by her body. Bodies. He could feel the stiffness in the fabric where it had dried. He should be disgusted and horrified at sitting there in her blood, but instead he was just numb.

The silence stretched out. He couldn’t seem to gather his thoughts into any coherent pattern. Jack finally said “It’s a sedative. Among other things. You were going into shock, and I want you conscious right now. It takes a few minutes to kick in. Owen says it’ll last for a couple of hours and then you’ll feel like shit. He wasn’t unhappy about that.” He uncrossed his arms and slapped a hand on the table. “What the fuck did you think you were doing!” he shouted.

Eyes still on the table Ianto said softly, “Anything I had to.”

Except at the very end. Even once he’d been forced to face what Lisa had become and what she had done, he wasn’t able to destroy her. He knew he’d made his choice between Torchwood and Lisa when he brought her here. He hadn’t realized it would need to be made again and again, or that he would ever doubt his decision. He was even grateful that the entire team, not any one person, had killed her. Someday it would help, knowing he couldn’t have stopped all of them.

He made himself look up when Jack dropped into the chair across the table and said bitterly, “I thought I knew you. I knew I trusted you. And now I find out that you’re smarter and more treacherous than I ever expected.”

“You saw what I wanted you to see and you never looked past that.” He wasn’t sure if he was offering excuses or blame.

“Well, I’m looking now. I want to know every security protocol you broke, every computer program you subverted, everything you did that put us at risk. Start talking.”

What he wanted to start with was, “Why did you kiss me?” He remembered Lisa throwing him across the Hub and feeling an odd relief as everything went black. He didn’t know how long that had lasted. His head swimming with returning consciousness and pain, he’d become aware of the captain holding him. For a few moments he’d felt a strong hand against his face and a warm mouth moving over his, and for a heartbeat he’d remembered what life was like when you weren’t half-crazed by desperation and deception. But Jack had stopped him from asking then, and he didn’t know if he was ready for an answer now. Instead he asked tiredly, “What do you want to know?”

“Where the equipment came from, how you got it here, why nobody noticed.”

He sat up straighter and focused on the question. “The security assessment you had me do when I started gave me everything I needed. I knew the lower levels weren’t used. I couldn’t depend on being able to tamper with the main computer sensors without getting caught, so I had to keep the automatic scans going. As long as the main computer didn’t have any reason to initiate a scan, and I had everyone accustomed to asking me to run errands and check things for them, nobody would find her down there.”

“It.” Jack corrected tersely.

“I modified the auto scan parameters to exclude her life signs, and entered the metal components as pre-existing equipment. The Cybermen made the last few conversion units of materials from Torchwood, so they didn’t have an alien signature. I brought everything in one night when you and Owen and Suzie went to the pub. Karaoke night, I think. I just had to erase the internal CCTV.”

“And obviously we believed whatever excuse you gave to avoid coming. Diligently filing, I suppose.”

“I wasn’t invited. But I would have made an excuse if I had been.”

He couldn’t interpret Jack’s expression as he stood abruptly and left the room, followed by the snick of the lock being turned from outside. He wondered where Jack thought he’d go if he had the chance. He closed his eyes, wishing the universe would end now and save them the trouble of dealing with him. A few minutes later he heard the lock again, and as he opened his eyes, Jack walked in with a pitcher. He’d taken the time to wash his hands and face, judging from the dampness of his hair. He would have liked to do the same, but this probably wasn’t the time to ask. Jack sat down again, poured more water into the glass on the table, and pushed it towards him. “Owen said you’re probably dehydrated,” he said briefly. He drank gratefully, and Jack refilled it when he put it down.

“Keep going.”

“I looked for a scientist or anyone who could understand what they did to her, but most of the names I recognized work for UNIT or were killed at Canary Wharf. I read journals and websites, anything to do with cybernetics. Finally I found Dr. Tanizaki. He insisted that we should have studied the Cybermen’s equipment before it was destroyed, that we’d lost a great opportunity to advance our knowledge and help people. I contacted him by email at first, and then we talked on the phone. He was intrigued, and I begged him to come see for himself.”

It felt strange to be talking this calmly. The flares of intense emotion in the last few hours had ripped through the rigid self-control he’d maintained for so long. Keeping the secret had been so exhausting, the obstacles so great, that sometimes he had desperately wanted to ask for help. But every alien destroyed or imprisoned in the cells reinforced the conviction that Jack would see only the Cyberman shell, not Lisa inside. He refused to accept any outcome except her complete restoration, and he quickly buried the occasional, despairing thought that she would be better off if she had died like everyone else. Now two more deaths were on his conscience, Lisa _was_ dead like everyone else at Canary Wharf, and there was still no relief.

Jack led him through his bypasses of security at Torchwood 1, although they were minor by comparison and hadn’t been premeditated. Grieving, he had dragged her from the conversion chamber to the shelter of a storage room in a nearby building. When he realized that she could survive with some kind of life support, he had gone back to the destroyed building to collect the pieces he needed, a list provided by her between gasps. He supposed that should have been his warning. His Lisa wouldn’t have known the engineering needed to build the cradle from the conversion unit.

“So you came here.” Jack said grimly.

He drank more water. “Yes.”

He understood that Jack was angry about the personal betrayal in addition to everything else. He wanted to explain that the Ianto Jack knew was real too, just not complete. He wouldn’t want to hear how much it had meant, after nights spent in the basement working on Lisa’s hardware and watching her struggle for survival, when Jack would flirt or casually rest a hand on his shoulder. It reminded him he was human, and had probably kept him close to sane.

“I think Suzie knew.” Jack’s expression became grimmer. He felt she’d betrayed him personally, too. “Not what I was doing,” Ianto explained, “but that there was something to hide. She wanted to spend a lot of time with the glove and she knew I wasn’t up there when she did.”

Jack slowly shook his head. “Great. How did I miss both of you? Twin obsessives, both endangering Torchwood. Should I just be glad you guys took us on one at a time?”

“It wasn’t a goal,” he muttered. “It was just a…a result…,” he trailed off. Somehow that didn’t sound much better, and Jack didn’t look like it was giving him any comfort.

“Ianto, I’m furious, just in case that wasn’t clear," Jack said intensely. "There was never any question that it had to be destroyed, and it should have been done at the beginning, by you, because you were there and the one who found it. If you couldn’t do it, then you should have got someone who would. There are two people dead because of you. You put everyone and everything here in danger. The entire fucking world in danger.” He slammed the table again for emphasis.

Jack was right, but it hadn’t been logic driving him. “I’m sorry,” he said drearily. He felt like that was all he’d been saying all night, and no matter how true it was, he was tired of hearing it come out of his mouth. “I can’t change what I did.”

Jack leaned back in the chair, anger transmuting into something wearier. “What you can do is to come back to the team, do everything that we’ve come to rely on you for, and make us believe we can trust you again. You face everyone upstairs and you deal with the results of your decisions. You stop hiding behind a façade and we learn who you really are. I can’t stop you from taking retcon, but I won’t give it to you.”

Jack took the glass and drank the rest of the water. He filled it again from the pitcher and pushed it back. He leaned forward, his voice quieter but still intense. “I’ve done terrible things to people. A few of them I’d do again. At the time I thought it was necessary, or at least that there was a good reason. I’ve done it out of love and I’ve done it out of fear, and even out of pride. The dead can’t give you absolution; only you know if there’s a lesson to learn. We all have our secrets, if it makes you feel better. Yours are just known to a few more people now.”

His mind was blank. He knew Jack expected some response, but he didn’t want to say ‘I’m sorry’ yet again. Forgiveness was beyond comprehension. After a minute, Jack sighed, pushed back his chair, and rose. “Come on.” He started towards the stairs. Ianto stood up, muscles stiff, exhaustion settled in his bones, feeling the effects of the evening all over. It was hard to grasp how much had changed in just a few hours. His head spun and he gripped the table for a moment. Jack came back to him. “What’s the matter?”

“Uh, just dizzy.” Without comment Jack slipped an arm around him and helped him take a few steps. Once he could manage on his own, Jack let go and led him up the steps from the interrogation room to the cells the staff used when they didn’t want to sleep on the couch. Jack opened the first door and gestured for him to go in. The room was very small, containing only a bed and another doorway that led to an equally spartan bathroom. At the moment it looked like heaven.

Jack closed the door and nodded towards the bathroom. “Take a shower. Throw your clothes out here.”

Getting clean was a relief, and eventually he just leaned against the wall, letting the water flow over him. Jack reached in and tossed something on the sink. He closed his eyes and felt the ache in his throat as misery crept back. Oh Lisa, he thought, I’m so afraid. At least I had hope. Every morning now I’ll wake up and remember what you became and that I’ll never see you again.

When he finally turned off the water, he looked at the clothes Jack had thrown in. He pulled up the sweatpants and slipped the sweatshirt over his head, then pulled the neck up and sniffed it. There was a faint scent of something he associated with Jack. He sighed and left the bathroom. Jack had put sheets and a blanket on the bed while he was in the shower. He’d also brought in a chair and was sitting in it with his feet propped on the foot of the bed. Ianto hovered awkwardly. “Are these your clothes?”

Jack opened his eyes. “Yeah. Don’t you keep anything here besides suits and starched shirts? Everyone else has at least a spare pair of jeans. Do you even have normal clothes?”

He fingered a sweatshirt cuff with bemusement. Normal, said the man who wore clothes six decades out of date. “It’s been so long since I thought about things like that.”

“Get into bed. You’re about to crash.”

He pulled the covers up and gratefully lay his head on the pillow. He closed his eyes and asked, “Are you going to watch me sleep?”

“Just for a little while.”

The only thing disturbing the silence was a soft rustle as Jack shifted position. Since the universe didn’t seem ready to implode just for him, he longed for even the temporary oblivion of sleep. But he wanted to make Jack understand. “Lisa needed me, and I couldn’t save her. I don’t know what to do.”

Jack said nothing, then finally, gently, “Lisa died at Canary Wharf and nobody could have saved her. I need you now, and you won’t have to save me.”

The last thing he heard was his own voice saying sleepily “Oh. Okay sir.”

He didn’t feel the hand brush across his forehead, or the light kiss on his mouth. But when he woke up in the morning he saw one of his suits draped over the chair. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it wearily, then got dressed and went up to work.


End file.
